Deconstructing the Dichotomy of Aboriginal Dreamings

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Recommended: Prehistoric aboriginal culture

Dreamings or Dream Time creates access to the ancestral world. Based on research, the Aboriginal lifestyle can be divided into the human or what I think of as the real world, from the sacred world and the physical world. The human world, in which I will just call their “reality,” is the world that consists of the people, their culture in the generic form, and basically their daily lives. The sacred world is where Dreamings take place. It is the ancestral world where the world was created, where ancestors are roaming and creating. This world in not situated only in the past but also in the present (more will be said of this later). Finally, there is the Physical world which connects the previous two realms. The physical world is the landscape, it is nature, it is land formations it is the tangible materializations of the world. During their Dreamings or Dream Time, aboriginals witness and learn the creation stories that formed the physical world. The Myths of these stories goes often something like this: The sky gods where sleeping but then they arose and created the landscape by transforming into different characters along the way. Once the Sky Gods were done with formations they took the shape of different features of the land like rocks or mountains (Eliade 1973:45). The Dream Time then is a time to transcend from their reality to another worldly realm. This is in order to discover the stories of their ancestors and their totems. Here is where they learn the stories of their realities. What is interesting to analyze at this point, which has been done by Alan Rumsey (Rumsey 1994), is acknowledging that “Dreamtime is a sense of dreaming in that it is not taken place in the everyday life of reality. It is in the sense a different ...

... middle of paper ...

...16-130 Sydney: Oceania Publications, University of Sydney.

Stanner, W.E.H.

1998 [1956]. “The Dreaming,” in Traditional Aboriginal Society (2nd ed.), ed. W.H.

Edwards, 227-238.

Stanner, W.E.H

1979. White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences

Turner H. David

1991. Dreamtime: Life, Afterlife and the Soul in Australian Aboriginal Religion, India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4. Pp 4-18 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002242

Venbrux, Eric

2002 The Post-Colonial Virtue of Aboriginal Art Zeitschrift für Ethnologie , Bd. 127, H. 2, pp. 223-240 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25842867

Wolfe, Patrick

1991 On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 33, No. 2 pp. 197-224 http://www.jstor.org/stable/178901 .

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